1 John 3:11 - We Should Love One Another

1 John 3:11 - For this is the message which you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. -- World English.

Love for the brethren is a most important factor in our Christian lives and, despite the stringent urging of John here in his epistle, one that is often found exceedingly difficult to put into practice. True, we always pay lip-service to it and even when our bungling mismanagement of affairs within our fellowship has resulted in a physical separation of believers who ought still to be worshipping and working together we try to excuse ourselves by saying that we still regard our separated ones as brethren and still have Christian love for them. It is doubtful if the Almighty endorses our words; still more unlikely that He will lightly excuse a condition of things where mutually antagonistic groups of disciples maintain themselves in separate "camps" asserting doggedly that their own views of Divine things necessarily constitute "Truth" and the extent to which their opponents differ is the extent to which those opponents are in 'error'. There is certainly a case for the orderly gathering of Christians into varying groups adapted to their varying spiritual needs. Men are creatures of indeterminate characteristics. But even though one believer feels that he is brought closer to God in the reverential surroundings and ritual of a High Church service, and another only in the Puritan simplicity of a Quaker meeting-house, there can always be a oneness between such, born of mutual respect for each other's beliefs and convictions, in the sober realisation that the Holy Spirit has said "in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth" (2 Tim.2.20). Such a oneness can reveal itself in a hundred ways without any "sacrifice of principle" or "lowering of the doctrinal standard" or any of the other sops to conscience which we are so ready to invent to excuse what we know inwardly is our betrayal of our Lord's own heartfelt prayer "That they may be one, as we are". -- Excerpt from: A. O. Hudson, "Studies in the Epistle of 1 John - Part 23," Bible Study Monthly, September/October, 2011.

www.biblefellowshipunion.co.uk/2011/Sep_Oct/1Jhn(23).htm